Indeed! The temperature generally favors Flatpak, no doubt. Personally... I tolerate it.

It's useful for things I can't manage otherwise. Though I'll admit I'm in an incredibly small niche -- I maintain RPMs on COPR for fun... and at work.

I part with an anecdote! We weren't too careful on some Ubuntu systems and ended up with critical networking services in Snap.

The saving grace was: these systems are completely offline, so it couldn't sneak in updates. Note: this usually shouldn't be a big worry, but we have some debt

Over AppImage or APT, really? Do people ever go "great, it's not in my distro but there's a FlatPak available, just as good"?

Not saying you're wrong, but this is surprising to me, and not my own reaction as a full-time Linux user.